Posted
by
timothy
on Saturday July 07, 2012 @03:36PM
from the hope-springs-eternal dept.

Snirt writes "A group of ex-Nokia staff and MeeGo enthusiasts has formed Jolla (Finnish for 'dinghy'), a mobile startup with the aim of bringing new MeeGo devices to the market. According to its LinkedIn page, Jolla consists of directors and core professionals from Nokia's MeeGo N9 organization, together with some of the best minds working on MeeGo in the communities."

Your worries are valid. My hope is that they decide that absolute openness of the platform (so basically like the true-Maemo n900 was, rather than the fake-MeeGo-broken-Maemo n9) will lower the entry bar to a level where people feel it might be a fun thing to play with, as the time investment on trying to work around restrictions is minimal. I.e. something every linux hacker would want. Once (and if, of course) there's a critical mass, hopefully it will take off in a bigger way.

Those great people believe in bright future for MeeGo based phones. Microsoft also believed in bright future of MeeGo, so they spent billions of dollars to kill it. Windows phones are disaster: non-existant or buggy software (I can not download more than a dosen books on my new Windows phone - if I do that I have to reinstall Kindle App to get access to my books).

There's a fine line between "Flamebait" and "saying what a lot of people think, and delivering it very bluntly". "Me go plop plop" is in fact a very common phrase on the alt.tasteless newsgroup, for example. I'd have modded it insightful rather than flamebait!

Probably more of the blame for that should go on Intel than Nokia. I always felt (I was a Nokia dev.) that Intel was the dominant part of the "partnership". (And that the "partnership" was about as fake as Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes'.)

They don't need to make a device targeted at Linux hackers. They can add those capabilities on whatever device they make. What they need to do is take the territory that Nokia lost when they abandoned Symbian, and deliver on support in ways that Android vendors fail utterly at. If they can do that, catering to us nerds is something they'll do anyway because they'll want that capability themselves.

While N900 is the best smartphone currently existing, it is a terrible phone exactly due to the telephony interface. If it rings while in a bag, there's a ~50% chance some random button on the touchscreen will press itself (and an incoming call unlocks the screen!). It can drop calls entirely due to a "turn the phone face down" gesture which must have taken some serious drugs to invent. The interface for calling someone is not any better.

So really, if there's a way to initiate (and perhaps even receive!) calls from the command line, it would actually be better than current shit. After beating some sense into the keyboard code, the terminal is more convenient to use than most laptops, I'd sure take having to type "accept" or an alias over randomly rejecting calls.

I am starting to worry whether we can rely on less popular open source software? In recent few years many of the open source libraries and software I use were discontinued.

Ultimately it's unwise to base your business upon something that your organization is unable or unwilling to maintain.

This question comes to my mind: Which open source projects we may trust (to rely on them)?... perhaps those which have a better business and sustaining plan ?

I'm sure you've heard of the phrase 'there are no guarantees in life' which also applies to software. If you (or your company) are dependent upon something that is developed by a 3rd party, it's wise to get a support contract. As an example: Redhat offers support as well as other organizations which develop OSS. Consider licensing the code, or hiring the developer(s) outright, failing that fork it and learn to maintain it in house. A lesson from my professional life: software constantly changes.

This is really dangerous for Nokia. Non-compete clauses have no effect here as these guys don't "compete" in the strictest sense.

Demanding promises not to compete are not a feature of Finnish business life. In fact, it's the opposite: when laying off workers, Nokia has always pledged to help set them up with another firm doing something similar to what they were working on at Nokia. The idea is that since Nokia has decided some project no longer makes sense for its bottom line, it can't do any harm if people keep pursuing it at another firm.

This is what is playing out now with Jolla and has happened numerous times before with other Nokia spinoffs.

I should have included the bit before that. I know about that, but how does that affect its openness?

Aegis prevents messing with some of the system files, but it's not too hard to circumverent/disable Aegis alltogether. Install open kernel or use Inception. [endno.de]

Though I haven't bothered with either. Aegis hasn't (yet) come into my way when porting software to the phone or installing stuff from community repository with apt-get. Much of stuff in community repos are just stock debian armel packages, with slight modifications in control files.

If you know how to compile programs in Linux, then that's the only thing you need to know to port stuff to Harmattan. Install Scratchbox to your computer, log in to it, download sources, apt-get necessary -dev packages,./configure && make and scp resulting binaries to your phone. For extra points you can ofcourse roll it into debian package and kindly ask at #harmattan IRC channel for your package to be added to the community repository so that everyone can install it on their phones with apt-get.

N9 is just awesome. Swipe UI wipes the floor with Android and IOS + it really feels like a true Linux computer. Elop has made sure it's hard to get, but IMO it's easily worth all the money you throw for it.